1,721,072 research outputs found
Power or Partisanship? Populist Parties in Power and Social Concertation: The Case of the Italian Yellow-Green Government, 2018-2019
Full text linkThe ascent to power of anti-system populist parties poses a potential challenge to social concertation and established systems of interest intermediation between the state and the representative bodies of organised labour and capital. Indeed, populist parties hold ideological anti-elite positions that potentially negate the role of representative «intermediate» bodies such as unions or employer organisations. But how do populist parties actually behave vis-à-vis social concertation with organised producer groups once in power? Do they stick to their ideological guns and opt for disintermediation, or do they engage in social concertation strategically, according to their power interests, as the literature on social pacts and government weakness would predict? This paper tackles this question by investigating the attitudes and practices towards social concertation of Italy’s 2018-2019 coalition government between two different variants of populist parties – the Lega and the Five Star Movement. The paper finds that upon entering government, these populist parties adopted a rather «normalised» approach towards social concertation when in power, although with distinctive traits. Under conditions of government weakness and intra-coalitional divisions, they activated channels of social concertation to achieve various «power related» objectives: to gain leverage and power vis-à-vis rival coalition partners; to appease the opposition of organized producer groups, especially employer organisations, to their policy agenda; and to gain credibility and issue ownership in policy areas deemed to be of specific social partners’ competence. Selective engagement in social concertation thus emerges as a potential channel for populist parties to achieve negative integration in the metapolitical system
Labour Market Policy in Italy’s Recovery and Resilience Plan: Same Old or a New Departure?
Full text linkLiberalizing labour market reforms have topped the agenda of structural reforms implemented in Italy over the last two decades, with detrimental effects on employment quality, wage dynamics and productivity. In 2021, Italy’s then Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, promised that the investments outlined in Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) would ‘transform Italy’s labour market’. How and to what extent does the labour market policy agenda enshrined in Italy’s NRRP deviate from the prior trajectory of policy change? What balance of economic, political and class interests does it reflect? And to what extent does it adequately tackle the long-standing challenges of Italy’s labour market? This article addresses these questions combining in-depth analysis of the labour market policy measures in Italy’s 2021 NRRP and interviews with experts and elites involved in the policy process. Contrary to claims of discontinuity, the findings highlight substantive continuity of the NRRP labour market policy agenda with the prior trajectory of liberalization. The Plan maintains a narrow focus on supply-side labour market interventions – primarily the strengthening of active labour market policies (ALMPs) – without re-regulatory interventions to tackle labour market insecurity or wage stagnation. Exogenous conditionality and domestic political dynamics that systematically advanced the preferences of employer organizations in the design of the NRRP account for the limited extent of policy change. Due to the neglect of demand-side labour market interventions and the uncertainties surrounding the implementation of the ALMP reforms, the transformatory potential of the NRRP’s labour market agenda is likely to remain limited.Introduction Labour-market policy in Italy from the great financial crisis to COVID-19 Labour market and employment policy in Italy’s NRRP: contents and goals The politics of LMP in the NRRP Discussion and conclusions Disclosure statement Additional information Footnotes Reference
Le mobilitazioni dei fattorini della gig economy in Italia: forme organizzative e implicazioni per la rappresentanza
No full textHow the Eurozone disempowers trade unions: the political economy of competitive internal devaluation
Full text linkThe marginalization of trade unions was a notable feature of the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone periphery. However, governments have recently imposed liberalizing reforms against union protests in the Eurozone core too. We argue that organized labour loses influence across the core-periphery divide because the 'new economic governance' puts national governments under enhanced pressure to compete against each other on wage and labour market flexibility - a process known as competitive internal devaluation. The article illustrates this argument through comparative quantitative indicators of liberalization and qualitative process-tracing in three core countries. Whereas Germany's outstanding competitiveness position allowed its unions to extract significant concessions, their counterparts in France and Finland faced unprecedented defeats from governments aiming to restore economic growth by closing down the competitiveness gap to Germany. Our findings highlight the class power implications of the Eurozone's reliance on the labour market as the main economic adjustment variable
The mobilisation of gig economy couriers in Italy: some lessons for the trade union movement
No full textIn October 2016, in Turin, northern Italy, cycle couriers working for the German food delivery
company Foodora staged a series of public protests which quickly attracted considerable media
attention and became known as the first case of workers’ mobilisation in the Italian ‘gig economy’.
The protests sparked a lively debate in Italian public opinion about working conditions in the
so-called ‘gig’ or ‘on-demand’ economy. However, the debate remains confused by the ambiguous
meaning of these terms, often conflated with unrelated concepts such as that of the ‘sharing
economy’ (Blanchard, 2015; Drahokoupil and Fabo, 2016); and by the as yet limited understanding
of what these ‘new’ work organisation forms entail for the evolution of employment practices
(Eurofound, 2015; Valenduc and Vendramin, 2016) and for the possibilities of workers’ collective
organisation. Analysing the case of the Foodora riders’ mobilisation in Italy thus offers a timely
opportunity to reflect on the current challenges facing the labour movement, in Italy and in Europe,
in the brave new world of the ‘gig economy’
Riders on the Storm: Workplace Solidarity among Gig Economy Couriers in Italy and the UK
Full text linkIn light of the individualisation, dispersal and pervasive monitoring that characterise work in the ‘gig economy’, the development of solidarity among gig workers could be expected to be unlikely. However, numerous recent episodes of gig workers’ mobilisation require reconsideration of these assumptions. This article contributes to the debate about potentials and obstacles for solidarity in the changing world of work by showing the processes through which workplace solidarity among gig workers developed in two cases of mobilisation of food delivery platform couriers in the UK and Italy. Through the framework of labour process theory, the article identifies the sources of antagonism in the app-mediated model of work organisation and the factors that facilitated and hindered the consolidation of active solidarity and the emergence of collective action among gig workers. The article emphasises the centrality of workers’ agential practices in overcoming constraints to solidarity and collective action, and the diversity of forms through which solidarity can be expressed in hostile work contexts
Under pressure. Economic constraints, electoral politics and labour market reforms in Southern Europe in the decade of the Great Recession
Full text linkEven when subject to comparable exogenous constraints during the Eurozone crisis and in its immediate aftermath, governments in Southern Europe have pursued distinct labour market reform agendas. What room for manoeuvre did governments of crisis-struck peripheral countries really have in shaping their labour market reform strategies, and how can we account for the observed variation? We address these questions by making a twofold contribution to the debate on the political economy of austerity in the Eurozone periphery. First, through the first systematic analysis of all labour market and collective bargaining (CB) reforms implemented in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece over 2009–2019, we identify those elements of core labour market deregulation common across Southern European countries (namely, the loosening of employment protection for workers on open-ended contracts and the decentralisation of CB to the firm level); and those elements of variation, both cross-country and cross-party, in the content of corollary labour market interventions that accompanied this core deregulation. Second, we explain these similarities and variations in reform outcomes as the product of the interaction of two factors: economic constraints and electoral dynamics. We argue that the implementation of the common core of deregulation is linked to the exogenous pressure to improve export competitiveness to which Southern European countries have been subjected since the crisis. Through the combination of survey data analysis and qualitative evidence, we then show empirically how the variation in the corollary measures accompanying deregulation is linked to the class composition of the electoral social blocs Southern European partisan governments rely on or aim to assemble. Based on this analysis, we identify four ideal-typical labour market reformist strategies attempted by Southern European governments during the decade of the Great Recession. The analysis highlights that although domestic politics plays a crucial role in shaping structural adjustment under crisis conditions, not all reform strategies are equally viable within the framework of Economic and Monetary Union
Persistent structures, uneven policies. The politics of enforcement and forbearance towards informal employment in Italy
No full textDifferent political actors in power display divergent policy orientations towards informal employment, alternating between enforcement and forbearance, despite its high political and economic costs. Existing accounts of informalisation are unable to make sense of this policy variation. Building on the literature on the politics of forbearance, we argue that whilst employment informalisation, as a de facto liberalisation of employment relations, sustains economic accumulation in several sectors, it also responds to specific electoral-political logics. The political weight of economic groups whose accumulation strategies benefit from utilising informal employment stimies enforcement efforts and favours forbearance. We illustrate our argument by analysing variation in the policy agendas towards informal employment implemented by partisan governments in Italy between 1990 and 2019 in light of the composition of their electorates. We show that, despite persistent structural constraints, the weight of informality beneficiaries on the side of capital in the support bases of partisan governments shapes their policy approach towards employment informality. The greater the political weight of informality beneficiaries, the more pronounced is the policy emphasis towards de facto forbearance and «symbolic» enforcement efforts that leave the structural causes of informal employment untouched
All of one kind? Labour market reforms under austerity in Italy and Spain
No full textMost scholars have highlighted the commonalities of labour market reforms under austerity in Europe, mostly in terms of liberalization. We argue that a more differentiated analysis is in order, as empirical developments point to distinct reform trajectories. We analyse in detail the two Southern European cases where pressure for austerity was intense, but governments maintained a degree of discretion as they were not subjected to direct bailout conditions: Italy and Spain. We examine the period since 2010, which includes a major labour market reform in each of the two states in 2012. Using a theoretical framework that allows distinguishing forms of liberalization, we find that reforms in the two states indeed differed markedly. In Spain, flexibilization and declining coverage of protection prevailed, whereas in Italy flexibilization was combined with improved protection of workers at the margin of the labour market. The differing influence of the centre-left helps to explain this divergence
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